Follow the money is always a good principle.
Jeremy Mohler of “In the Public Interest” details where the crackdown on immigrants produces big profits.
“Buried under all the bad news this week was a glimmer of progress. No, not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s win in New York’s 14th Congressional District — that’s way more than a glimmer. I’m talking about the order from a California judge to reunite separated undocumented immigrant families within 30 days.
“Who knows whether and how the Trump administration will implement the order? But one thing’s for sure: if Trump continues to criminalize immigration, the need for detention space will continue to grow.
“That’s music to the ears of the private prison industry, particularly CoreCivic and GEO Group, two publicly traded corporations that currently detain over two-thirds of undocumented immigrants. It’s music to their investors too — both have seen their stocks skyrocket in recent weeks.
“Because this is what they’ve been waiting for. As we document in a new report, CoreCivic and GEO Group both have been getting in the game of offering loans to governments to build jails, prisons, and detention centers. Both have turned private equity financing, also known as “public-private partnerships,” into a central growth strategy after they became Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in 2013. In other words, private prison corporations want to be landlords.
“Why? Because REIT status allows them to dodge corporate-level taxation. Last year alone, GEO Group avoided almost $44 million in taxes.
“So here comes the federal government desperate for more cages to lock up undocumented immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security is considering adding space for 15,000 more adults and children in family detention centers. The agency already hired GEO Group in 2017 to finance, design, build, operate, and maintain a new 1,000-bed adult detention facility in Texas, which is expected to be up and running later this year.
“All of this has the corporations salivating. A couple weeks ago, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told his company’s investors, this is “the most robust kind of sales environment we’ve seen in probably 10 years, not only on the federal side with the dynamics with ICE and [U.S.] Marshals, but also with these activities on the state side.”
“GEO Group and CoreCivic now stand more ready than ever to, as they describe it, “partner” with the Trump administration and “understand and accommodate their changing needs.” And they’re going to dodge a ton of taxes doing it.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Beware of anyone who is marketing a private “partnership” to provide public services and infrastructure. This is another example. I predict the ads will screw up self-driving cars.
View at Medium.com
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The public-private relationship will result in the same problems we have seen in charter schools. Profiteering and branding will take priority over the actual needs of public transportation. The result will be a lot of toll roads where there used to be commonly supported roads paid for by taxes.
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even more like the choice school game: a lot of toll roads but none of the toll money going to road repair
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George Zoley, a Greek immigrant himself, leads the GEO corporation. He was a generous Trump donor and supporter during the campaign. “To the victor belongs the spoils.”http://www.newsweek.com/geo-group-private-prisons-immigration-detention-trump-596505
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The psychopaths that worship at the altar of avarice live their lives based on endless greed. Nothing else counts. They would gladly destroy the earth and trigger the end of the human species — just to make more money. They have no morals. They have no empathy. They have no conscience. They are incapable of feeling guilt. They are arrogant and look down on everyone else as if we are an inferior species.
They are the ones that must be controlled by the U.S. Constitution and the legal system.
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This information comes from a petition that I signed calling on all tech companies currently supporting the operations of ICE and CBP to cancel their contracts. These companies are making $$$ millions off of the suffering of immigrants. This is beyond sickening.
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The Trump administration’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy has left thousands of children alone in a foreign land, separated from their families and caregivers. The disastrous policy is cruel and a violation of human rights. And there were American companies profiting off of it and continuing to profit off of Trump’s xenophobic agenda. The act of separating and detaining families would not be possible without a massive bureaucratic and logistical machine behind it.
Several tech companies have contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal law enforcement agencies who are enacting violence on brown and Black people at the border and within the interior of the US.
For example, Microsoft has a $19.4 million dollar contract with ICE. In a January 2018 blog post, Microsoft boasted about how Azure, it’s cloud computing services, which can range from hosting a customer’s data to facial recognition, was making the agency more efficient. According to Microsoft’s own communications, their product is “mission-critical” to ICE’s operations.
Microsoft, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, and Dell are all complicit in and profiting from a mass incarceration and deportation scheme hatched by a white supremacist presidential administration.
Salesforce: Salesforce signed a contract with CBP to build custom software for hiring purposes. CBP is using a product called Community Cloud to “increase core human resources information technology capabilities for current and prospective employees, while at the same time, driving efficiencies throughout the process.” They are also using Salesforce Analytics and Service Cloud.
Thomson Reuters: $6.8 million for four contracts with ICE to provide support to ICE in its “mission to locate, arrest, and remove criminal aliens that pose a threat to public safety.” The information they provide is crucial to funnel immigrants into Operation Streamline, the trial system designed to deport immigrants en masse.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise: $75 million contract with CBP to manage its network operations center. The company also is in the middle of completing a $39 million contract with ICE, among other, smaller bids.
Motorola Solutions: $3 million for a “core upgrade/GPS project/mobility project,” which is further categorized in documents as “integrated hardware/software/services solutions.” ICE also awarded the company a contract for a “tactical communications program” with a potential award amount of $15.3 million.
Dell: $22 million in active contracts with ICE. Most of the contracts are software licenses. The company also provides support for Microsoft products used by the agency.
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Subject: Tech is “mission-critical” to ICE. These companies must divest from Trump’s deportation agenda.
Sign here: http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/Microsoft_ICE/?sp_ref=420704162.176.188873.e.609118.2&referring_akid=14880.1244311.-Vc7KP&source=em_sp
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PPP or Public Private Partnerships are just the Democrat version of privatization. Public money going to make rich people richer while impoverishing the middle class, poor. Or your tax dollars going to make profits for the rich, not you, with your infrastructure on the line with no accountability.
Those children will never be returned to their parents because they are funneled through HHS, which in turn places the children in Child Protective Services (CPS), which gets 26.4 billion dollars a year in a privatized child welfare system where the ‘product’ is the children released to the adoption market. Yes, it is a market.
I actually tried to tell Jeremy Molner about this a while back. He wasn’t interested. Neither are your Senators and Congress-people.
There is no due process in CPS and families lose their relatives for things that are ‘not abuse’ (adoptable) vs actually helping children who are abused. They’ve changed the definition of abuse (legally) to make adoptability, the predominant reason for the termination of parental rights. They’ve also lowered the standard or ‘burden of proof’ for taking children, meaning if you ‘might’ do something again, something not even related to actual abuse, they can still take your child.
70% of the homeless taken by CPS in Los Angeles county are homeless when they ‘age out’ of the system, damaged beyond repair by a system that sexually assaults them, medicates 90% of the kids in their care (KY etc), or warehouses them in Juve centers around America. In the name of further helping these children, many states have moved to 21 as the age these children can ‘age out’ thereby increasing the revenue stream for 3 more years.
We need a #CPStoo fight to save the American children taken by CPS in the name of protection that is really the right to profit off the most vulnerable children in foster care.
Pip
PS – Yes, Prison Corps own CPS ‘warehouses’. They have the same ‘low occupancy’ contracts that Juve, and prisons make with their respective state governments.
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